A Translation Project Report Of The Luster Of Lost Things(Excerpts)

This is a project report on the translation of the three chapters extracted from The Luster of Lost Things,a maiden work of Sophie Chen Keller.The book presents a story about love,in which Walter Lavender Sr.,a little boy with motor speech disorder,helps others with his uncanny ability of finding lost objects under the company of his mother Lucy,a golden retriever Milton and some other people.The translator aims to improve his skills of translation,to promote works of foreign writers of Chinese origin,and to bring attention to the children with motor speech disorder.The translation must reproduce the delicate style of The Luster of Lost Things.Sophie Chen Keller was born in Beijing and raised in Ohio and California,whose fiction has won several awards.Her work features for its exquisite words and long and complicated sentences.For this reason,the translator must readjust sentences with the instruction of translation theory and skills for a fine translation conforming to the grammatical rules and the language habits of Chinese.The translator follows the theory of Communicative and Semantic Translation,which is proposed by Peter Newmark.And translation skills,including division,addition,conversion,inversion and repetition,are adopted to narrow the gap between English and Chinese as well as provide an aesthetic pleasure for Chinese readers.From this process,the translator gets a clear recognition that a good translation requires not only an accurate understanding of the original text but also a fair capacity for writing in Chinese.And,translation is a process of information transmission by rewriting the original text.